Mrs Darcy vs The Aliens

The woman was in a terrible state. He’d seen corpses in the dissecting room that were in a better condition than this one.

“What in God’s name happened to you?” said Bamber.

“Ripped apart I was … ripped …”

“I can see that, Miss … Miss … sorry, what was your name?”

“Mary … Ann … Nicholls … Mary … Ann …”

“Who did it, Mary Ann?”

A look of horror passed across the woman’s face. “It was a thing that burst out of me …”

“Like some sort of abcess?” he said.

“With tentacles,” said the woman, shaking her head.

He looked at her in pity. She was clearly delirious.

“Don’t say another word, Mary Ann,” he said, covering her with his cloak. “Just try to relax. I’ll look after you as best I can. My name’s Bamber: I’m a medical student.” Although he’d never encountered anything quite like this, he thought to himself. There was probably nothing he could do for her other than make her comfortable and wait for nature to take its course. It was like something from hell.

That was it.

From hell.

The woman started to babble again, talking about aliens with tentacles and how she’d tried to be an honest girl and hadn’t told anyone about the Prince Regent like he’d especially asked her not to.

“The Prince Regent?” said Bamber. “There is no Prince Regent, Mary Ann. Do you mean Prince Albert, the Duke of Clarence? What has the Duke done to you?”

“Prince Regent … ripped apart … Mary Ann Nicholls …”

Then she gave a violent cough and was silent. Bamber felt her pulse and realised that the woman was dead.

“You there!” came a voice from behind him. He froze. It was Gull. Of all the people that he should come across this night and in these circumstances, Sir William Gull, physician to the Royal Family and frequent lecturer at the College of Physicians, was probably the one that he would have picked last.

“Sir?” he said, turning round to face his interlocutor. As he did so, he dropped his copy of Gray’s ‘Anatomy in a Country Churchyard’. Gull picked it up and handed it back to him with a precise, deliberate movement.

“Who is this woman, laddie?” said Gull. “And what is a medical student like you doing in Whitechapel on a weekday evening when you should be hard at your studies?”

“Sir, I was making my way home to my lodgings – ”

“– a likely tale – ”

“– and I came across this poor girl. She had been viciously attacked – ripped apart, even. And before she passed away she seemed to be muttering about the Duke of Clarence being involved – ”

At this, the old doctor grabbed hold of Bamber and pulled him to his feet. “Leave this to me,” hissed Gull. “Go home and bury yourself in your textbooks like a proper student. And if you value your life, never speak a word of this matter to anyone. Not even on pain of death. Do you understand?”

“I … I do”, said Bamber, shaking.

“Good,” said Gull, releasing him. “Well? Go, boy. Go!”

Bamber backed away from Gull, then turned to go. He left Gull bending over the woman, as if trying to decide what he should do. As he rounded the next corner, he noticed a carriage parked at the side of the street. For a moment, he swore that there was someone watching him from the inside. But as he turned to look more closely, the curtain was swiftly drawn and he could no longer see anyone.

As he made his way back, he went through everything that had happened that night and the more he pondered it, the more he realised that however much he learnt about the world from his books, in the end, he didn’t know Jack.